JO BURR MARGADANT

Gender, Vice, and the Political Imaginary in Postrevolutionary France: Reinterpreting the
Failure of the July Monarchy, 1830–1848

The power of the media to shape our own political perceptions doubtless explains in part the recent flurry of scholarly works that examine representations of royalty in the popular press, beginning as early as the sixteenth century. How did royal figures fare, these studies ask, once political pamphlets, caricatures, and the serial press turned politics into an imagined world, onto which men and women, variously positioned in the social order, might fasten fears, hatreds, and some notion of themselves? Robert Darnton set the stage for such inquiries years ago with his pathbreaking study of the scabrous publications of the "low enlightenment" in eighteenth-century Paris. Following in his wake but armed with new concerns, several historians have recently reshaped investigations of the fate of monarchy in France and England by focusing on gendered imagery in battles over royalty.¹ No one has turned that scholarly optic yet on the failed monarchical experiments of postrevolutionary France. The purpose of this article is to offer a new interpretation of the failure of a French constitutional monarchy by examining the hopelessly contradictory symbolic order that a French royal family had to embody after 1830. The vulnerability of constitutional monarchy in France owed its origins, the analysis argues, to particular features of the gendered political imaginary of the French elite. That judgment leads naturally in the conclusion to a brief comparison with the very different fate of Britain's constitutional monarchy in the nineteenth century. 1

Frontispiece: Design by Auguste Bouquet, lithograph by Becquet (6, rue Furstemberg), "La poire et ses pépins" (The Pear and Its Seeds), La caricature, no. 139, plate 289 (July 4, 1833).

     To link the differing fates of constitutional monarchy in nineteenth-century France and England to the gendered political imaginary of their publics situates the argument in a much larger debate about historical causation. The analysis presented here rejects the classic definition of a public sphere of political action and opinion, clearly separate in its concerns and fantasies from the intimate relations of private life, and substitutes instead a conceptual approach that brings the two together and suggests, thereby, why publicity about a political leader's purported "vices" can arouse politically dangerous responses in the general public.² In American politics, the most obvious recent victims of this phenomenon are Bill and Hillary Clinton. But even long-dead political icons like Thomas Jefferson raise public ire when publicity about their private lives touches morally sensitive areas in contemporary social life.³ How much more powerful, then, might be the emotional response to adverse publicity about a reigning monarch whose intimate and familial relations were a public concern by definition and whose removal from the throne depended on death or revolution? Sexual secrets have often figured in cases of highly charged political scandals in the past, but other "vices" have elicited equally volatile responses in publics attuned to different moral issues in their personal lives. The idea of exploring links between the morally charged universe of private experience, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, critiques of political leaders and the political order they uphold has given rise in recent years to strikingly new interpretations of the origins of mass political movements as diverse as Chartism in England and revolution in France.⁴ What they also have suggested are some of the many different ways that gender, an explicit ordering feature of the moral universe of intimate relations, can shape the rhetoric of politics and denunciation in public life as well. This article applies that scholarly insight to the political battles taking place in Paris in the 1830s and 1840s, where it uncovers powerfully and variously gendered morality tales about the monarch and his family that were driving France toward revolution once again. 2

     As those familiar with French history know, the struggle opened by the French Revolution between republicans and monarchists did not close definitively until the later 1870s, when the majority of the French electorate finally embraced the Third Republic. During that long republican gestation, the one serious attempt to combine monarchy with liberal governing institutions modeled after England occurred under King Louis-Philippe, who assumed his royal title in 1830 through a legislative act after a popular insurrection in Paris overthrew his reactionary Bourbon cousin, Charles X. Eighteen years later, following nearly as many years of relentless insults in the press aimed directly or indirectly at the king, the July Monarchy collapsed in another popular insurrection, tarred with ignominy in the public eye. 3

     Once so easily explained as the consequence of economic deprivation, a corrupt political elite, and a despised and venal monarch, the Revolution of 1848 shares today something of the mystery for historians that it held at the time for the exiled Louis-Philippe. Much outstanding recent work on Orléanist politics has focused on the ways defenders of the monarchy challenged accusations by their detractors.⁵ The brilliance now recognized in the ideas articulated by the monarchy's defenders and the symbolic gestures orchestrated by the king can only leave us wondering why the regime could not convince the public, especially when France experienced an economic takeoff in the 1840s, as David Pinkney has shown.⁶ Even the old theory about a popular revolution by an impoverished Parisian populace recovering from two years of high bread prices and recession rings strangely hollow. Pierre Rosanvallon has recently argued that nothing either the Bourbons or Louis-Philippe might have done would have implanted constitutional monarchy, since the French had no tradition of individual rights needing protection from the state to justify giving power to a king.⁷ Yet Rosanvallon joins the chorus of historians mystified by the Revolution of 1848 itself.⁸ Are we to conclude with Gordon Wright that the overthrow of Louis-Philippe was a historical accident, a simple failure of royal nerve?⁹ 4

     That interpretation cannot explain, unfortunately, the widely sensed fragility of the regime in the 1840s. Nor can it account for the vicious treatment of the king and members of his family by the press. It has long been understood that a campaign of insults and denunciations by a ferociously hostile press brought the king into insurmountable disrepute early in his reign, but his vulnerability to such attacks was generally assumed to lie in his own unscrupulous behavior.¹⁰ This article sets out to reinterpret the power of those attacks from two perspectives previously unexamined. The first reflects on the glaring absence of familial metaphors in the political language defending the regime that might have legitimated the presence of a royal family. Lynn Hunt and Sarah Hanley have recently insisted that the French monarchy of the Old Regime, like other European monarchies in the eighteenth century, relied on family metaphors to justify royal authority in the public imagination as much as in the body of the law.¹¹ This essay turns the argument around to ask what happened to the monarchy when the discourse of public life substituted for royal paternalism an imagined public sphere based on individual merit. The effect, I argue here, could only devastate the claims of royal dynasties. Once a meritocratic rhetoric triumphed after 1830 in the language of ambition and public service, the cultural scaffolding necessary for a dynastic regime to survive from one generation to the next in France collapsed. Much of the abuse leveled at the king and royal family by the opposition press, together with their own strategies for countering charges of undeserved privileges, has its origin in this fundamental contradiction. 5

     Still, to point out the incongruity between dynasticism and meritocracy does not explain the venom of attacks against the king or the symbolic repertoire used by his opponents to destroy his reputation. That requires a familiarity with the code of honor that informed the political battles and public life in general during the regime. Two recent studies of male honor in this period among the elite of urban France by Robert Nye and William Reddy greatly advance our understanding of those attacks.¹² Nye establishes what bourgeois honor required of elite men and women in the nineteenth century, while Reddy clarifies why the journalistic culture of the elite under the July Monarchy was so vicious. Taken together, these two perceptive cultural studies offer up a gendered code for reading the symbolic weapons that eventually destroyed Louis-Philippe's good name. Nonetheless, it is only in following this war of symbols over time and in syncopation with major political events that we finally can unravel the strange finale to the reign of Louis-Philippe: a good man with an exemplary family life, scourged in the press as a liar, thief, and murderer; a man so hated by the populace of Paris that rampaging crowds in 1848 destroyed his family's personal belongings in the Tuileries Palace, while bands of revolutionary arsonists burned his private home in Neuilly to the ground. 6

     The evidential basis for this analysis combines two sorts of representations of the royal family. On the one hand are denunciations by their detractors in the opposition press. These include dozens of caricatures mocking or otherwise attacking the king and sometimes members of the royal family, numerous hostile articles in the periodical and daily press, and satirical pamphlets that appeared sporadically throughout the regime.¹³ From this empirical data, I have chosen representative images to suggest how over the course of the first five years of the regime, Louis-Philippe mutated in hostile caricatures from a figure of immense ridicule into a violent, manipulative moral monster, setting the stage for a popular anger so intense it placed the very lives of the royal family at risk. Tracing the role assigned by the republican press to unmistakably gendered images exposes a gradual masculinization of the symbolic language in which republicans cast their political struggle. All sides would come to emulate this language—all sides, that is, except the populace of Paris.¹⁴ The surprising result of a gendered interpretation of the images attacking the king and royal family unavoidably reopens the question of what precisely in the political imaginary of the people of Paris made it possible to call them to the barricades in 1848. 7

     On the other hand, I rely on a variety of other sources, ranging from official ceremonies and portraits, spontaneous gestures by members of the royal family in the public eye, and their own private correspondence, to examine changes in how the royal family presented itself in response to opponents' hostile readings of their acts and motives.¹⁵ The paradox elicited from this second set of evidence reveals a royal strategy that, far from strengthening the royal family's claim to represent the nation, manifested the inherent contradictions in a meritocratic political culture of representing the nation through a single family. A comparison with the English case makes the point still more persuasive, while at the same time suggesting that the real Achilles' heel of constitutional monarchy under any royal family in France lay in the peculiar position assigned under a "bourgeois" monarchy to the queen. To understand how the political imagination of the French elite militated against royal representations of the nation, however, we need first to understand the honor code operating within this same elite.¹⁶ 8

     From the outset of the July Monarchy, partisans and enemies alike used the term "bourgeois" to characterize the new regime. In his study of masculinity and male codes of honor, Nye argues that this label had less to do with precise social origins than with a set of values among urban elites in nineteenth-century France that associated male honor with individual achievement.¹⁷ The idea dated to the Old Regime, when bourgeois sons had to acquire public honor individually through personal effort and success, while noble men, who were born with honor, merely felt obliged never to lose it through a dishonorable act. By the nineteenth century, bourgeois honorability had developed specifically gendered features also. Physical bravery, courtesy toward other men, and gallantry toward women persisted from an earlier noble version of male honor, but bourgeois masculinity now placed men and women in a polarity of complementarity and difference. Honorable men could not resemble women, but they also had to seem attractive to them.¹⁸ Moreover, honor for a man depended on the sexual honor of the women under his control, which he was bound to defend from public insult. Throughout the July Monarchy, the campaign of insults directed against the king and royal family presumed an audience familiar with this vocabulary of "bourgeois" honor and dishonor. 9

     Both Nye and Reddy attribute the verbal and physical violence of French male elites in postrevolutionary France to the importance of individual honor in their imagined meritocratic social universe. In fact, individual merit was not enough to get ahead. Family connections, exchange of favors, and deferential manners were crucial to success, a reality that nobody could honorably admit about himself but everyone imagined explained another's triumphs. The peril for reputations was particularly acute in public life, which required a disinterested exercise of power free of private interest.¹⁹ Reddy blames the cynicism of French journalism from the late 1820s through the July Monarchy on journalists' own anxiety about their professional honor. In freelance journalism, financial success (a requirement of family honor) meant writing for intensely politicized papers on opposite sides of the political fence, but professional honor required a disinterested respect for truth. Caught between these incompatible imperatives of professional and familial honor, journalists developed a touchy professional culture, scornful of moral posturing and distrustful of the influence of money in public life. 10

     Yet a cultural interpretation of the regime's demise cannot examine only the outlook of the king's detractors, since Louis-Philippe, too, identified his family with a meritocratic, bourgeois code of honor. He really had no other choice. Enthroned by revolution and a legislative act, Louis-Philippe could hardly appeal to blood and birthright to legitimate his throne. Nor had he ever so intended. By accepting power as Louis-Philippe I instead of "Philippe VII," he clearly signaled to the French the beginning of a new dynastic line.²⁰ The problem after 1830, as Rosanvallon rightly sees, was to find a principle on which to base a royal house.²¹ Louis-Philippe's conundrum was less the newness of his claim than the fact that, after 1830, merit finally triumphed over blood as a legal basis for every public honor except the throne. Although the Charter of 1830 made male primogeniture the basis of the monarchy, elsewhere the principle lacked any legal sanction in either public or civil law. The risk to the regime was not lost on its supporters. Staunch Orléanist defenders argued strenuously in the Chamber of Deputies against abolishing hereditary peerage in the upper house on just those grounds.²² The king resigned himself to this outcome, even though it meant for his potential heirs a never-ending need to prove their claim to represent the nation, not as men with royal blood but rather as outstanding men of honor, exemplars of their sex both as family men and in service to the public. 11

     The application of postrevolutionary notions of honor to a royal family presented other difficulties. Conforming to a bourgeois code of honor placed Louis-Philippe the father in an impossible contradiction with Louis-Philippe the king, a paradox that resembled structurally the dilemma faced by freelance journalists. As a good father, he was honor-bound to provide for all his children equally and well, but as king, he was expected to devote his property to the public welfare. His efforts to resolve this dilemma honorably would unleash so fierce a press attack on Louis-Philippe for greed and fraud that, by the end of his reign, caricaturists conjured up a man for whom not even human life took priority over avarice. The attacks in both the legislature and the press occasioned by these contradictions exposed the inherent vulnerability of a bourgeois monarchy. Neither husband of France, as kings had been under the French marital regime government, nor father to his people, as the later Bourbons sought to be, nor a member of the band of brothers invented by republicans in the revolution, this king in his familial role could only be a man like any other, torn between his private interests and his public duties.²³ Unavoidably, any act that advanced the royal family's interests risked the charge of defending not the nation but the ambitions of the royal family. 12

     This unavoidably private aspect to the public image of the royal family had important repercussions on the position assigned to royal women. Old Regime law had long barred women from the throne of France. Both the Charter of 1814 and the revised Charter of 1830 reiterated that prohibition. Under the Old Regime and during the Bourbon Restoration, however, women from whom a sacred royal heir had issued held a place of honor in representations of the kingdom and the nation; in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, several had even served as regents.²⁴ After the revolution of 1830 denied the sacred status of a king, there remained no clear meaning for a queen. Tracking the fate of Queen Marie-Amélie in representations of the nation, therefore, opens still more vistas on the ineluctable demise of monarchy in France. What we shall discover is a progressive masculinization in the capital and in the press of images of the monarchy. Once politics became a battleground, a bourgeois conception of male and female honor applied to royalty, and a concern for the royal family's physical safety forced the queen to withdraw from public view, leaving the king, supported by his sons, to struggle with his opponents to define the monarchy. But when the queen disappeared from public view, what differentiated this royal father from other heads of households competing in the public sphere for wealth and power? In fact, Marie-Amélie's position was doubly compromising for the royal image, since her presence in the public eye might serve as a reminder of the private nature of this family's relationship to the throne, but her absence could give the same impression.²⁵ 13

A political culture enmeshed with notions of male honor did not exclude women at the outset of the July Monarchy, quite the opposite. Early efforts by both supporters and opponents of the regime relied heavily on images of women to represent its essentially good or its vicious nature. The Orléans family adopted a similarly gendered strategy. Highly visible supportive roles for the queen comprised a central part of their initial bid for public favor. Indeed, the kaleidoscope of queenly images paraded before Paris in popular illustrations or by the royal family itself during the first years of the reign offered visual proof that a new era in monarchy had begun. (See Figure 2.)²⁶ On the domestic front, several nights a week, the queen entertained informally at the palace in a frankly bourgeois manner, with the women of the family seated at a table doing handiwork, while the king, standing at the fireplace, conversed on political matters with male guests.²⁷ Drawing on bourgeois manners once again, the queen sometimes strolled on the arm of her husband in fashionable parts of Paris. Furthermore, like any bourgeois mother proud of her sons' achievements, she attended the annual award ceremony at the lycée Henri IV until the youngest of her sons had graduated. Exemplary wife and mother, the queen also performed two civic roles assigned to women. One positioned her iconographically as the necessary female spectator for all ceremonies that celebrated the link between the king, the nation, and the men responsible as soldiers or citizen militia and as lawmakers for defending the regime.²⁸ A second wrote her into celebrations of the July Revolution as comforter for the wounded and benefactor for the daughters of the heroes who had died.²⁹ The official script for narrating the nation to itself, in other words, specifically included a feminine dimension represented by the queen. 14

Figure 2: Lithograph by Alexandre Fragonard, "Le Roi Citoyen et sa famille" (The Royal Citizen and His Family), Collection Portraits, Louis-Philippe, 80C 101283, Estampes, Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

     Far from being imposed on public life, a feminine presence in the official nation only echoed a view recorded throughout the popular press and on all sides of the political struggle.³⁰ Popular prints commemorating the insurrection of July 1830 showed women caring for the wounded, tossing boulders from their windows, loading guns for men at the barricades, even sometimes replacing fallen insurgents.³¹ A number of artists, journalists, and workers presented the meaning of the revolution through the body of a woman shot at the Place des Victoires, the first victim of the revolution.³² Victorious insurgents carried one live "heroine of the barricades" into the Palais Royal to present to Marie-Amélie, a marvel that her third son, the adolescent duc de Joinville, promptly recorded in a watercolor.³³ Although printmakers stopped depicting women as agents of popular violence within a few weeks of the revolution, they did not disappear from visualizations of the nation.³⁴ Through 1833, the opposition press on both the left and right configured political space with women in it. For Legitimists, accidents born of personality and events made this a necessity since the activists fastened all hope for another Bourbon restoration on an insurrection under the titular helmsmanship of the duchesse de Berry, the widowed mother of the adolescent Bourbon heir in exile. But some of the most implacable enemies of the regime in the republican press, the publishing house of Aubert and the journalist Charles Philipon, who together produced La caricature and Le charivari, two newspapers that specialized in political caricatures, placed women among the imaginary spectators to their campaign of ridicule and derision.³⁵ No matter which side used them, configurations of women into political space permitted favorable reflections on the honor of their men; indeed, with the exception of the duchesse de Berry, that was their transparent purpose. 15

     All the same, if supportive wives and daughters could enhance the honor of men in public life, other relationships with women might undermine it. For that reason, through 1833, easily recognizable gendered symbols figured prominently in the repertoire of mockery unleashed by opponents of the monarchy in political caricatures. To decode their contemptuous assault, one need only consider that, since the triumph of a bourgeois definition of masculinity, to dishonor a male opponent in a gendered setting meant presenting him either as an abuser of women or as too much like them. Opposition journalists and artists pursued both lines of attack to withering effect against the king and heir apparent.³⁶ Put simply, which is how political humorists expected jokes to work, the message they imparted at a single glance went this way: a brutal leader who mistreated women had no honor, while a feminized male authority could not defend the nation's interests. 16

     Republicans and other critics on the left were particularly well-positioned to attack the king as an abuser of women since iconographic renderings of liberty and the republic, the two principles that they purported to defend, always took the form of women. So could la France, la presse, and la constitution, which were feminine nouns as well. Armed with this plenitude of female glyphs, republican and proto-republican artists regularly moved onto a gendered field of honor in which the opposition press assumed the role of chivalrous protector and Louis-Philippe received the role of unprincipled villain.³⁷ A typical example appeared in the April 1833 La caricature, depicting the king as Bluebeard in the act of murdering La Constitution, while in the background, La Presse leans out her window holding two republican papers, and knights ride to her defense with La République on their banner.³⁸ (See Figure 3.) Legitimists managed to project similarly dishonorable intentions on the king by presenting the arrest and imprisonment of the long-widowed duchesse de Berry as a real-life melodrama, in which her uncle bribed a traitor to reveal her hiding place and then shamelessly dishonored her with the delivery of her doubtless illegitimate child in prison, though she claimed to have secretly remarried. Not surprisingly, attacks on Louis-Philippe as an abuser of women reached a veritable crescendo in 1833. 17

Figure 3: Design by Grandville (J.-I.-I. Gérard) and Bernard-Romain Julien, lithograph by Becquet, "Barbe bleue, blanche et rouge" (Blue, White and Red Beard), in La caricature, no. 127, plate 263 (April 11, 1833). The commentary explained: "'It's Louis-Philippe about to slaughter Constitution . . .' The Press leans out of her tower holding two republican papers, La tribune and Le national. Constitution calls to her: 'Press, my sister, don't you see anyone coming?'—'I see two knights riding at a gallop carrying a banner; it's the banner of the Republic.'"

     Still more often, the opposition press derided the masculinity of the king by infantilizing or feminizing his body parts and clothing in ways that spoke directly to the eye. For instance, a caricature might place him up against more virile opponents, a foreign power or the invincible Republic, in the posture of a child.³⁹ (See Figure 4.) Artists for Le charivari and La caricature became exceedingly adept at inventing subtle emasculating signs implying royal impotence even without the visual presence of an enemy. A few such images became, in time, recognized logos for the king. A loosely closed umbrella beside the bulging figure of the king in a culture where an aristocratic ideal of slender manliness lingered on, hinted broadly at Louis-Philippe's unmanly weakness. Soon, just the image of a soft umbrella in a caricature was enough to symbolize his flabby presence.⁴⁰ The pear, too, which began under Philipon's pen as a caricature of the royal face, evolved quickly into a replacement for the king's entire body, suggesting among other things a woman's profile.⁴¹ Sometimes, the pear carried prurient overtones, especially when represented as soft or small, as in a caricature from 1832, "False Gods of Olympus," which presented the king's eldest son and heir to the throne, the duc d'Orléans, as an insipid, scrawny Hercules, holding a little pear to symbolize his genitalia and, hence, the dynasty; while a proud cock, representing France, steps out from under the skirts of the fat and effeminate king, "Jupiter-Louis-Philippe," wearing a toga with an empire waistline.⁴² (See Figure 5.) 18

Figure 4: Artist unknown, lithograph by Becquet, "Le nouveau Josué" (The New Joshua), Le charivari, no. 323 (October 20, 1833).

     Typically, in the first years of the regime, artists who denounced the supposed avarice of the king, an accusation that more than any other would destroy his reputation, also expressed disdain by feminizing his appearance. Here, though, feminizing the king's body, rather than suggesting impotence in public life, implied removing him figuratively from the sphere of the public into the realm of private interest and familial ambition. In 1833, that effort produced a richly suggestive portrait of the king as a poor father begging public funds with a tethered cock, which stood for France, tied to his wrist as a mark of ownership and a loosely folded umbrella in his hand suggesting feminine softness.⁴³ (See Figure 6.) The same year, his entire family, whose members had themselves assumed pear shapes in earlier prints, turned up in Le charivari, seated beside a treasure chest in the center of a softly rotten, giant pear.⁴⁴ (See Frontispiece.) Decidedly, the royal pear had moved into the home, the fountainhead of all bourgeois ambition. 19

Figure 5: Design by Grandville and Eugène Forest, lithograph by Becquet, "Les faux dieux de l'Olympe" (The False Gods of Olympus), La caricature, no. 98, plates 200–01 (September 20, 1832).

     The grounds for complaint over Louis-Philippe's greed present no mystery.⁴⁵ Under the Restoration Monarchy, he had successfully reclaimed much of his father's private property from before the 1789 revolution and inherited a considerable fortune from his mother. This private fortune, together with several chateaus from his father's princely appanage, which Louis XVIII had restored to him and the legislature eventually confirmed, made the duc d'Orléans by 1830 the richest man in France. On the eve of accepting the throne, to keep his private properties outside the public domain, he placed them in a trust for his children with himself as lifetime beneficiary of the revenues. At the same time, he expected his annual appropriations, or civil list, to be as large as Charles X's (18,000,000 francs), the reinstatement of the Orléans appanage, an income for his heir apparent, and dowries and dowers for his children when they eventually married. After much delay and heated debate, the legislature only conceded a reduced civil list, the appanage less one chateau, and an annual income for his eldest son so as to give him some independence from his father. The question of dowering his children, the law stated, would only arise if the king's private fortune did not cover his expenses. Thus, from the very beginning of the reign, the new monarch's financial strategy and hence his image as father and king straddled public and private spheres. 20

Figure 6: Artist unknown, lithograph by Becquet, "Un pauvre père de famille qui n'a que quelques millions de revenus" (A Poor Father of a Family Who Has an Income of Only a Few Millions), Le charivari, no. 344 (November 10, 1833), série politique 129. Although the commentary reports that the king's "family" are members of the government, readers would have understood that this image, in fact, referred to the king's own family.

     Louis-Philippe recognized in these maneuverings no moral conflict that impugned his honor.⁴⁶ He could not in good conscience disinherit his children, since an unstable monarchy offered no guarantees for their future. Once on the throne, though, he viewed his family as agents of the public whose prestige, munificence, and marital alliances lawmakers should guarantee as proof of their importance to the nation, especially since he himself intended to use the revenues from his children's private trust together with his annual royal income to embellish royal chateaus and palaces in celebration of the glorious past accomplishments of the French. The argument gained little sympathy with the public, once his enemies had published in excruciating and exaggerated detail the extent of his private fortune.⁴⁷ Significantly, only Legitimist supporters of the exiled Bourbons expressed shock that a king would prevent his private property from entering the public domain. In tacit recognition that the family of a constitutional monarch chosen by the people had an existence apart from the throne, neither supporters of the new monarchy or republicans publicly questioned his right to a private fortune. Following the same logic, however, his opponents protested his demand for more money, more chateaus, and subsidies for his married children by presenting him in the press as an archetypical bourgeois father out to fill his coffers at taxpayers' expense. 21

By 1835, the symbolic trappings of attacks on the king had changed in tone and imagery. When the subject of ridicule was diplomatic relations, infantilizing and feminizing the king remained the weapons of choice. But on domestic issues, Louis-Philippe had gradually metamorphosed in caricatures from a weak and womanish figure into a master trickster and Machiavellian monster who dominated by deception, manipulation, and force. In the process, the pear declined as a metaphor of vice in preference for more masculine signs of depravity that included images of the hypocritical rogue Robert Macaire, a character invented for the stage in 1834 by the actor Frédérick Lemaître, who now entered the repertoire of symbols that evoked the king.⁴⁸ Significantly, the victims of Macaire's schemes for extracting money from the rich were always gullible male protagonists or women as unscrupulous as himself. The virtuous maiden of popular melodrama disappeared from this theatrical commentary on the hypocrisy of contemporary life as well as from the political caricatures that used it. Somehow, the gendered vocabulary of visual jokes that vilified the king in the early 1830s had lost its purchase. 22

     The most obvious reason for this shift in imagery lies in the increasing violence of resistance to the monarchy and the severity of the government's repression. Legal battles with the press had been a constant feature of the regime since 1831.⁴⁹ By a law of November 29, 1830, any journalist who attacked the dignity and constitutional prerogatives of the king, the order of succession to the throne, or the rights and authority of the legislative chambers was subject to prosecution, and, if found guilty, to substantial fines and several months in prison. Between 1831 and 1834, the government successfully prosecuted 204 cases, but, since it lost another 300 because juries refused to convict, such tactics only encouraged journalists to invent ever more subtle innuendoes for maligning the king and royal family.⁵⁰ What changed the visual vocabulary in this running battle was the government's crackdown on organized political resistance. The crisis began with a Draconian law on associations in early 1834.⁵¹ But the turning point arrived in April and May when the government smashed an uprising by silk workers in Lyons and crushed another revolt shortly afterward in Paris. Deaths, arrests, and jailings, all became directly attributable to Louis-Philippe in images from the opposition press. A caricature by C. J. Traviès in Le charivari of a lumbering, brutal creature with victims piled carelessly on his back, which any regular reader of the paper understood as Louis-Philippe, powerfully expressed this new development.⁵² (See Figure 7.) Iconographically, the king had turned from an abuser of women into a murderer of men, and politics in the political imaginary of the opposition moved off a multi-gendered field of honor onto a battleground exclusively for men. 23

Figure 7: Design by C. J. Traviès, lithograph by Junca (Passage Sulnier, no. 6), "Personnification du Système le plus doux et le plus humain" (Personification of the Gentlest and Most Humane Government), Le charivari, no. 198 (July 27, 1835).

     Republican artists were not alone in representing Louis-Philippe as a murderous monster. Wild theories implicating him in the assassination of the duc de Berry had circulated already in 1820, immediately after the event. In 1832, with the captured duchesse de Berry in prison, the Legitimist press resurrected those suspicions and wove them into a gothic tale of Bourbons martyred by the ambitious Orléans family. The story opened with his father's vote in the Convention in 1793 in favor of executing Louis XVI, included his own alleged conspiracy to assassinate the duc de Berry, and culminated in a plot to murder the duc de Bourbon to prevent him, after the revolution of 1830, from changing his will, which gave the bulk of his fortune to Louis-Philippe's fourth son.⁵³ In 1832, this chronicle of horrors imagined the captive duchesse de Berry as Louis-Philippe's next Bourbon victim. Unavoidably, the ambiguous finale to her imprisonment with the birth of another child eliminated her from the saga of the Orléans villainy. Legitimists, too, were left with a tale of unscrupulous ambition that included only men. 24

     This progressive shift toward a masculinized narration of politics by both the Left and Right had stunning consequences for the monarchy, because eventually the royal family would also embrace the masculine lexicon adopted by their enemies, and in so doing, reinforce an interpretation of the public sphere that their opponents would use to undercut them. Arguably, the visual starting point for the erasure of the feminine in republican iconography is Honoré Daumier's celebrated lithograph "Massacre sur la rue Transnonain," which memorialized the most infamous slaughter of the Parisian insurrection of 1834.⁵⁴ (See Figure 8.) A dead man in his nightshirt, splayed across the body of a child whose nightcap suggests a baby boy, lies near an old man, also shot in cold blood inside their home by government troops. Three generations of males, all positioned in the foreground of the scene with their faces visible, impart the message that only men figure in the civil war that had broken out again in France. The lifeless woman in the shaded background, with just her feet exposed, lacks any position in the battle. In Daumier's version, she becomes the least consequential victim of a vicious regime that massacres unarmed civilians. In 1834, this way of indicting the regime did not exhaust interpretations that lithographers placed on the event. At least one anonymous artist returned to the shaming device of 1830 in which the moral depravity of the regime is read through an innocent women's body.⁵⁵ (See Figure 9.) But in the final year before a new press law in September 1835 introduced pre-publication censorship for caricatures, forcing Le charivari and La caricature to fold, a female presence lost evocative power in images ridiculing and dishonoring the regime. Even La République configured as a woman faded as a rhetorical call to arms for men who saw violent confrontation between the government and themselves as the only way to defend the nation's interests. 25

Figure 8: Honoré Daumier, "Massacre sur la rue Transnonain," Collection Histoire de France, July 1834, Qb1 M 112444, Estampes, BNF.

     Undoubtedly, the eclipse of the duchesse de Berry as a political icon affected the political imagination of all factions in subtle ways. Certainly, for all sides, repeated fines and imprisonments dealt out to opposition journalists by a beleaguered government dramatized repression as a struggle pitting men against each other. Among republicans, another explanation for the masculinization of the political imaginary lies in the secret men's societies that took the radical opposition underground for the remainder of the monarchy's existence. From that conspiratorial perspective, the struggle to overturn the regime meant a continuous clash between men that only incidently and accidently victimized women. But the driving force behind this progressive shift toward a masculinized narration of politics by both the Left and Right was the elite's own pervasive code of honor as it had evolved in postrevolutionary France. According to that code, once male rivalry turned violent, whether in a duel, a war, or street battle, women did not belong on the field of honor. As the political struggle came to resemble a civil war, female images inevitably lost their evocative power. 26

Figure 9: Anonymous, Collection Histoire de France, 1834, Qb1 M 112445, Estampes, BNF.

     The point is fundamental for understanding how the imagined positioning of women as opposed to their real location in public space could change so radically for the elite over the course of the July Monarchy. In practice, Frenchwomen held a remarkably visible place in Parisian political life throughout the period. Whenever the great political orators spoke on hotly debated issues, fashionable women filled the galleries of the legislative chambers. They also attended in great numbers highly politicized public events such as controversial plays, the annual painting salon, and inductions to the French Academy.⁵⁶ Furthermore, all officially organized spectacles that celebrated national events presumed an audience of women.⁵⁷ But as the metaphors governing the political imagery in the press turned more violent and as the political rhetoric of journalists in particular became both more intemperate and injurious for reputations, the code of masculine honor ensured that women as part of the political imaginary would drop from sight. 27

     This manner of narrating the nation flatly rejected, of course, the official version of a king brought to power in July 1830 by the will of the entire populace of Paris, just as it would eventually eliminate any element in the national story for the queen to represent. Through 1835, in figuring the nation in public ceremonies, the king and queen refused to renounce the initial version of their symbolic role as a couple. Each year for national commemorations of the revolution, the uniformed king and his adult sons paraded on horseback through the streets of Paris between rows of national guardsmen and troops.⁵⁸ Afterward, in the presence of the queen and with an audience of Parisian families, the king reviewed the guard and soldiers. The entire ceremony served as a metaphor for the unity of a nation composed of families protected against extremists and invasion by armed citizens and troops. However, after an attempted assassination of the king during the parade in 1835, which left seventeen men and one female spectator dead, that ritual ended. Targeted for assassination by a seemingly endless stream of fanatics and uncertain of the loyalty of the national guard, Louis-Philippe never again dared to parade across the capital.⁵⁹ Henceforth, the royal family signaled its presence at celebrations of the founding of the monarchy from the safety of a balcony of the Tuileries Palace, or at military reviews in close proximity to it, in the first step of what would become a full retreat after 1842 from its aspirations to configure the nation through the royal family. 28

     The only hope for recovering popular approval for the dynasty rested with the heir apparent, who by 1837 showed signs of successfully distancing his own persona from the dishonorable traits attributed to the king.⁶⁰ Popular with the army in Algeria, willing, unlike his father, to risk war in Europe in a nationalist cause, personally attractive to both women and men, the new duc d'Orléans fit an ideal of masculinity accepted by the bourgeoisie across the political spectrum. Equally important, his father had excluded him from the Orléans children's private trust. With no legal claim to his father's private fortune and no money of his own, apart from what the legislature gave him, the duc d'Orléans could credibly assert a claim to serve the public interest only. Even though he, too, had many enemies, he apparently developed a genuinely popular following in Paris. After the arrival in 1837 of his bride, Hélène of Mecklenburg, which included a triumphantly enthusiastic welcome on the streets of Paris, the royal family had some chance of temporarily overcoming the fundamental problem of a bourgeois dynasty.⁶¹ Since the duc d'Orléans possessed the personal charisma necessary for the position that, under the constitution, he could claim by right of birth, his succession might have, in the short term, muted public opposition. That, in any case, was his parents' fondest dream. His accidental death in July 1842, by contrast, exposed the monarchy to the inherent contradiction between the dynastic ambitions of the Orléans family and the bourgeois familial values they sought to represent. 29

     Henceforth, the logic of attacks on the person of the king placed Louis-Philippe in an impossible representational dilemma. Threat of assassination had driven him and his queen off the streets of Paris. His unpopular second son, together with his wife, could not replace them in the public's eye as the duc and duchesse d'Orléans might have done, although the legislature did recognize the eldest uncle's claim to serve as regent for his nephew should the need arise. Neither king nor legislature could envision a regency under the widowed Hélène in a political culture anchored in a universe of male combatants. In fact, the debate in the Chamber of Deputies on the issue revealed the hopelessness of either choice. As head of the government, François Guizot argued against a regency by the duchesse, warning: "The security of the State, the nature of our institutions, the energetic development of our public liberties, require that royal power remain in virile hands."⁶² Alphonse de Lamartine, the poet-deputy, who alone among his colleagues preferred the widowed duchesse to a son of Louis-Philippe, nonetheless admitted problems. "There is something contradictory," he observed, "between . . . the presence of a woman in power . . . [and] this pernicious maligning by the press."⁶³ But if a female regent could expect an endless volley of salacious slurs, how would an unpopular son of an unpopular monarch fare? Lamartine once again exposed the paradox: "The dynasty that you so recently placed above a crater born of many revolutions must be . . . a dynasty on horseback . . . The passage from one reign to another will occur only under a vault of bayonets!"⁶⁴ If this martial imagery echoed the language of the opposition press, it also resonated dangerously with the royal strategy for winning popularity for Louis-Philippe's sons through active military service. Therein lay another quandary for a monarch who sought popular acceptance under a bourgeois code of honor in postrevolutionary France. 30

     The only honorable career open to a royal prince had always been military service. For the Orléans sons, who had to justify their privileged titles in a meritocratic age, honor required a distinguished military record, one recognized as such by other officers, their own troops, and the general public. The balancing act that this required for the four younger sons not only proved impossible to achieve but ultimately made them of dubious value and even pernicious for the monarchy. Their difficulties had multiple dimensions. Each prince necessarily held commands coveted by ambitious colleagues, since a titular post without authority had no value as a mark of honor. Furthermore, the king made sure, whenever French forces engaged an enemy, that one or more of his sons commanded forces, so as to give them the chance to show their mettle. Unfortunately, Louis-Philippe's determined pursuit of peace with other European powers limited these opportunities for ambitious officers, which only exacerbated envy of the princes.⁶⁵ But peace with France's traditional enemies also made it difficult for a prince to prove himself in situations that mattered to the public. The long conquest of Algeria, where four of the king's sons served intermittently, did not arouse French nationalism. The opposition could, therefore, credibly claim that the only purpose of this war was to seek glory for the royal princes.⁶⁶ But an even deeper ambiguity for the dynasty of using military service to acquire princely honor derived from the government's use of military units to control its urban populations, a practice that directly involved a prince on more than one occasion quelling a revolt, if only by riding in uniform and on horseback through contested areas. At least one son always remained in France, close to Paris and the king for just that purpose.⁶⁷ Thus, in 1847, when Louis-Philippe commissioned Horace Vernet to paint an official portrait of the dynasty that presented king and sons mounted on energetic horses outside the national museum at Versailles, which Louis-Philippe had founded to celebrate French glory, the result garbled the intended message.⁶⁸ (See Figure 10.) Rather than a dynasty in service to the nation, a hostile public could just as easily perceive in such a martial portrait men who would stop at nothing to protect their family.⁶⁹ 31

Figure 10: Anonymous lithograph of Horace Vernet's painting "Louis-Philippe and His Sons Riding Out from the Château of Versailles," Collection Histoire de France, C 23433, Estampes, BNF.

     The possibility for a malicious reading of the royal family's motives germinated insidiously in the press throughout the 1840s. Restrained by law from direct attacks on members of the royal family, the opposition press managed all the same to project a violent image of an avaricious king ready to fleece the nation and sacrifice its military honor to advance his own dynastic interests. Three occasions early in the 1840s offered his enemies an opportunity to solidify that reputation. The first arose when the Chamber of Deputies refused, despite Louis-Philippe's insistence, to dower his second son (dotation) at the time of his marriage, a refusal that both the king and opposition understood as an attack on his personal honor that also implied his greed. A second chance for opponents to impugn the monarch's honor developed when the government decided in 1840 to erect a wall around Paris and place several military garrisons in the vicinity to protect the capital against a possible invasion.⁷⁰ The opposition press painted the real purpose of the plan as a plot to defend the regime against revolts in Paris. At the height of this hyperbolic battle, another partisan incident occurred that seemed, if not to confirm the duplicity of the king, at least to recognize his reputation for mendacity as a fact. A criminal court acquitted editors of five opposition papers charged with publishing counterfeit letters attributed to the king. The letters were written to show his overriding goal in foreign and domestic policies to be his own survival. Amazingly, the defense persuaded the court that since some of the letters had been published in England in the 1830s with no official protest, the accused journalists had not published false documents knowingly.⁷¹ The verdict itself confirmed the success of the long and relentless press campaign to malign the character of the king. Thus, on March 14, 1840, when the celebrated actor Frédérick Lemaître, starring in a new play based on Honoré de Balzac's famous fictional criminal, Vautrin, made every effort to copy the gestures and voice of the real master criminal, Eugène-François Vidocq, and then in the final act appeared in one of Vautrin's many disguises with the toupee and sideburns of Louis-Philippe, the audience easily interpreted the insulting message. So did the heir apparent, who, having attended the play's premiere, promptly left the royal box.⁷² 32

     Still more treacherous than personal attacks on the king's integrity was a story of contemporary moral decay that created the impression in the 1840s of a whole society of "bourgeois" hypocrites, with the monarch only the most prominent example.⁷³ In the opposition press, the decade opened with a rash of social satires called physiologies, a genre that dated to the 1820s but suddenly appeared in great profusion in the early 1840s. The authors of these lampoons specialized in identifying social types to mock. When, therefore, three that appeared in 1841 and 1842, Physiology of the Umbrella, Physiology of the Jokester, and Physiology of Robert-Macaire, clearly targeted the king, his caricatured persona became the starting point for commenting on like-minded contemporaries with the same reprehensible traits.⁷⁴ From a personal vendetta, attacks against the king mushroomed into a condemnation of the social universe he purportedly embodied. The connection is important for understanding the fragility of the regime in the 1840s and the ease with which the opposition continued to undermine the monarchy without attacking it directly. Daumier's caricatures ridiculing the hypocrisy of contemporary social mores in "respectable" households no longer needed to point to Louis-Philippe for their political effect. Republican papers achieved the same result by filling their columns for incidental news items (faits divers) with stories about police spies, white-collar crimes, or murders in "respectable" families.⁷⁵ Consequently, in 1846 and 1847, when scandals involving graft, murder, and suicide engulfed three peers and a member of the Chamber of Deputies, even supporters of the regime acknowledged that the aftershocks might bring the monarchy down.⁷⁶ 33

     More than anyone, Louis-Philippe could not escape the tarring effect of a perception perpetrated in the opposition press that behind all claims by powerful men to speak for public interest lay pecuniary gain. His detractors had long since destroyed his reputation with respect to money. After February 1848, when caricaturists were again at liberty to mock the royal family, the theme of avarice became a favorite visual device. Several prints imagined Louis-Philippe making off to England carrying sacks of money.⁷⁷ One lithograph depicted the exiled king sitting on his treasure dressed as a mountebank with his four sons and two grandsons balanced on his shoulders as if to imply that greed had corrupted the entire male line of the dynasty and all they wanted from the throne was to enrich themselves.⁷⁸ (See Figure 11.) 34

Figure 11: Artist unknown, Imprimerie Lemercier, Paris, "Parade par le fameux Guizotin" (Parade by the Famous Clown Guizot). François Guizot was Louis-Philippe's unpopular First Minister, 1840–1848. Collection de Vinck, 1848, P 31641, Estampes, BNF.

     A telling feature of caricatures that postdate the revolution, however, especially by comparison with those that mocked the exiled Bourbons nearly two decades earlier, is the absence of any royal women. This erasure, far from incidental, provides a vital clue to both how the Orléans royal family presented itself in the closing decade of the regime and how the masculinization of the imaginary universe that enclosed the monarchy worked to undermine it. The progressive eclipse of Marie-Amélie in public life, noticeable as early as 1835 and conspicuous in the 1840s, has received little attention from historians. Those who note the queen's retreat into a domestic realm generally attribute it to personal preference.⁷⁹ A better reading would give due credit to Louis-Philippe's well-established sensitivity to his own milieu and recognize the difficulty in the last years of the July Monarchy of finding any persona for a royal wife or mother to enact without incurring criticism. 35

     Once the king could no longer show himself in Paris, few occasions arose for the queen to perform her wifely role of spectator for national events, apart from her yearly arrival in a closed carriage for the royal opening of the legislature. In her role of royal mother, she appeared in the capital on three state occasions between 1837 and 1841: first to accompany Hélène on her entry into Paris, then to welcome her third son back from his mission to St. Helena to retrieve Napoleon's ashes, and, lastly, to attend the baptism at Nôtre Dame Cathedral of the grandson expected one day to assume the throne.⁸⁰ After the death of the duc d'Orléans in 1842, however, circumstances for that performance did not recur, and the role lost any public meaning. Only as hostess at the court did she continue to carry on an active ceremonial life, though one muted in the press in the 1840s for lack of public interest in a household that the general public had come to see as private in its primary concerns. Widespread indifference toward court occasions accounts in part for the queen's invisibility in those years.⁸¹ 36

     Equally important, however, was the scrupulously apolitical public image that she crafted for herself as wife and mother, even though, within the family, certainly her children and almost certainly the king confided their opinions to her constantly.⁸² In 1844, when Louis-Philippe made an unprecedented royal visit to England at Queen Victoria's request, in keeping with her apolitical persona Marie-Amélie stayed home to care for grandchildren.⁸³ The royal couple aligned themselves astutely by such means with a postrevolutionary bourgeois culture that made public life a masculine concern, while the queen avoided any public controversy that would have dishonored her and, thereby, brought dishonor on her family. But what they could not escape were the dangers inherent in a masculine profile for the family captured in the caricature of all the Orléans princes as covetous mountebanks like their father and, in Lamartine's trenchant expression, "a dynasty on horseback." 37

This article set out to show the futility of efforts to legitimize any monarchy in postrevolutionary France, given its meritocratic ethos, the elite's notion of honor, and the widely shared opinion that self-interest fueled ambition in public life. Summarized briefly, the problems for the house of Orléans come to three. First, dynasticism necessarily conflicted with the principle enshrined by the revolution that public honors ought to depend on individual merit, a principle reclaimed under the July Monarchy with the elimination of all inheritable offices except the throne. Consequently, a popular king could no more guarantee an uncontested throne for his offspring than could an unpopular one. In theory, any candidate to the throne had to prove he merited the honor, and that meant a charismatic father might be even more difficult to succeed than a king who came to be despised like Louis-Philippe. As heir to the throne, the duc d'Orléans actually gained in public favor by disputing policies of his father.⁸⁴ The elite's complex notion of honor made his position extremely tricky, though. He had to look like a defender of the public interest by disagreeing with his purportedly avaricious and pusillanimous father. But, as a son, he had to show respect for his father or risk his own and the Orléans family honor. To prove his honorability as a potential king required both filial obedience and filial opposition. Near the end of his life, the duc d'Orléans showed signs of bringing off that delicate balancing act, at least in the political short run. After his death, the unpopularity of Louis-Philippe's second son foreclosed any such transitory solution to the contradictions of dynasticism in postrevolutionary France. 38

     A second dilemma for the monarchy concerned gendered taboos affecting honor. Throughout the July Monarchy, caricatures targeting the king and royal family, like their own perpetual self-invention, attest to the importance of these taboos to symbolic politics. They also imply ambiguity, however, in the representative value of royal women, since a queen and her daughters stood for the private sphere embedded in the public. That did not preclude their usefulness on some occasions, such as a national festival. Nor could the opposition press attack them as long as neither sexual improprieties nor too great an interest in politics turned them into legitimate targets. The men responsible for such an outrage would have dishonored themselves by such an act. Nonetheless, the honorability of royal women, like that of any woman, was a purely private matter. Nothing they did brought either honor or dishonor on the nation, only on their family. In matters of representation, therefore, when a monarch enjoyed popular sympathy, royal women could mirror those sentiments by applauding their men in public. But when a monarch was unpopular, too visible a presence of a wife or daughter served as a reminder to the public of the private interests of the royal family. The relative invisibility of the Orléans women in the 1840s and, above all, of the widow of the duc d'Orléans and the queen herself indicates the clarity with which all members of the family understood their problem, even though their disappearance could not solve it.⁸⁵ 39

     The final intractable obstacle to legitimizing the monarchy derived from cynical readings by the elite of their own contemporaries' motives. An imagined world where selfish men competed with each other to advance themselves and the interests of their families made it exceedingly difficult for anyone to build a reputation for pursuing public interest only. For the king, the fractured nature of political loyalties after 1830 rendered it impossible, but so did his activism as a ruler. Political historians have spent much energy analyzing Louis-Philippe's policies to either justify or vilify him on that basis. Pierre Rosanvallon set that debate aside by claiming that the king's fundamental vulnerability had as much to do with the lack of any theoretical justification for a king as it did with any particular policies. I would prefer to shift the argument once again not back to the specifics of Louis-Philippe's politics, since his opponents would have maligned him on their account no matter what, but to the sense of personal honor that drove him into an activist role in the first place. The problem lay once again at the intersection of a meritocratic ethos and notions of honor shared by the elite. If Frenchmen in the elite were deeply concerned about their honor, and public honor depended on demonstrating that one merited the honors that one held, how much more important might that have been for Louis-Philippe, a prince whom Legitimists alleged had connived to usurp the Bourbon throne? His honorability, if only to himself, his family, and his supporters, depended on proving his indispensability as king.⁸⁶ Otherwise, his presence on the throne dishonored him. Therein lies the paradox. A sense of honor impelled him to take charge, but in doing so, he only made it easier for his enemies to place him at the center of the depravity that they imagined all around them. 40

     Nevertheless, the nature of the depravity of Louis-Philippe and his regime in the imaginings of the regime's opponents differed from one social milieu to another in the revolutionary crisis of 1848. The point is crucial for understanding representations in the republican press of the violent incident that precipitated the popular insurrection and destroyed the monarchy. For what those images leave out suggests a fundamental difference between the universe of male combatants that the elite constructed over the course of the July Monarchy to represent its own political battles and the political imaginary of the people of Paris that brought them in fury to the barricades. 41

     By all accounts, popular agitation over the government's refusal to permit a political banquet in support of electoral reform was fizzling out on the streets of Paris on February 23, until a violent incident in which troops fired into a mixed crowd of spectators outside the Ministry of Foreign Affairs turned a political crisis into a revolt.⁸⁷ Intent on that result, several men in workers' smocks piled the bodies of the victims onto a cart to haul around the city through the night. To call the populace to insurrection, according to the contemporary testimony of the historian Daniel Stern, they repeatedly lifted the grisly body of a young woman to the torchlight crying, "Vengeance . . . They're slaughtering the people!"⁸⁸ Once laid out with the rest of the bodies on the Place de la Bastille, again in Stern's account, the sight of this female corpse electrified the populace.⁸⁹ Just as in July of 1830, it seems, the Parisian populace placed a dead woman at the center of their own version of the iniquities of the regime that justified rebellion. This time, however, the republican press refused to use that visual aid to account for popular revenge. Only two of the nine illustrations of the cart of cadavers located in the print collection of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France or that I discovered in other contemporary sources include a woman's corpse. The caption on one of them reads, "Arm yourselves, they are killing our brothers!"⁹⁰ The other, an English lithograph, printed in London with an English text and autographed with the signature "H. J. in Paris, 1848," alone among all nine illustrations aligned the bodies side by side with a lifeless female in the front, just the way Daniel Stern described them.⁹¹ The rest, if they included a woman at all, depicted her as an anguished spectator, usually with a child. Four of the nine simply eliminated women altogether.⁹² (See Figure 12.) 42

Figure 12: Design and lithograph by A. Provost, "Journée du mercredi 23 février" (Wednesday, the 23rd of February). The caption reads: "The dead, fallen in front of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, were placed in a cart and driven around under the light of torches." This print is the first plate in a series of twelve entitled "Paris en 1848," printed by Aubert. Collection de Vinck, P 31374, Estampes, BNF.

     The transparent purpose of this representation of events was to fit the insurrection into a narrative line that republicans had been developing visually in the press since the mid-1830s and that turned French civil wars imaginatively into a battle between men. By contrast, the moral outrage that apparently ignited popular fury originated in a much older imagined universe of conflict between the people and the state in which a regime revealed its true iniquity by shooting unarmed women.⁹³ If historians, like most contemporary commentators, have failed to grasp precisely what set off the February revolution, perhaps they should consider that, in the political imaginary of the populace of Paris, a woman's corpse still signified in February 1848 a war on the entire community, which in their own code of gendered honor in the public sphere justified, even required, retribution. 43

The collapse of Louis-Philippe's regime under the circumstances outlined here begs for comparison with Britain, the other major constitutional monarchy in this period with a relatively free and highly politicized press. There, despite periodic criticism, the royal family emerged by the close of the nineteenth century stronger than ever as a symbol of national pride. Certainly the difference between the French and English monarchies did not lie in the amount of private property belonging to the royal family, which was enormous in the English case as well. Viewed from the perspective of France, the sine qua non of that success lies, first, in the inheritance practices of the English landed elite, where male primogeniture was the rule, thereby legitimizing both royal dynasticism and the House of Lords. Equally essential was the possibility of a woman succeeding to the throne. Several recent studies of changing public attitudes toward the English monarchy note the importance to that story of royal domestic life.⁹⁴ Indeed, by the 1870s, when the English first began to call themselves Victorians, it was the domestic image of the queen, above party affiliation, that endeared her to the English and made her usable as an inclusive national symbol for the empire. For constitutional monarchy to survive once liberal political institutions triumphed, monarchs had to accept a purely symbolic position in the nation. But for that symbol to work, it had to represent something above politics and yet conterminous with daily life. A royal family that could, if necessary, place a woman on the throne could also in that very possibility distance itself imaginatively from the masculine political arena. Only under those circumstances could a royal family, cast in the role of the private sphere writ large, stand in for a nation in a liberal, democratic age. 44

     Ironically, the popularity of Queen Victoria and the popular hatred of Louis-Philippe arose from a similar perception in the general public that their intimate lives mirrored those of the dominant classes in the nation. For Victoria, that perception endeared her to the public, while for Louis-Philippe it led to the collapse of his regime virtually overnight and its equally rapid eclipse in public memory. Even among French royalists, disgust over the king's reputed "vices" definitively ruined Orléans dynastic claims after the Revolution of 1848, except as heirs to a restored throne for their Bourbon cousins. The explanation for this animosity lies in the fusion of the king's character in the public imagination with the greedy, unscrupulous schemers who peopled the satirical press, the Parisian stage, and contemporary novels in the 1830s and 1840s.⁹⁵ Born, perhaps, of the elite's own conflicted sense of honor that made everyone suspicious of a rival's honorable conduct, this caricatured version of a "bourgeois" outlook reverberated powerfully with the popular classes of Paris, whose anger came to focus on the royal family. The delight with which rampaging crowds destroyed the royals' personal possessions in the Tuileries Palace testified to their personalizing of this moral outrage. The demonization of the king also helps explain the euphoric belief among the people of Paris, until the bloody June days proved them wrong, that workers and bourgeois could create a socially just political order together, now the Orléans family had left. Above all, it provides a coherent explanation for the sudden and complete collapse in February 1848 of this French experiment with constitutional monarchy. In the political imaginary of all classes, the royal family's image had become synonymous with the egotism of a "bourgeois" culture that opinion makers in different media had encouraged people to believe engulfed their times and made disinterested public service under a "bourgeois" constitutional monarchy thoroughly implausible. 45

     What do we learn about modern political conflicts from the interpretation of the failure of the July Monarchy offered here? Public responses to Queen Victoria in England and Louis-Philippe in France point to an important feature of modern politics that has not received enough attention from historians. Impassioned public reactions to political conflicts depend for their intensity on moral codes drawn from private life, however political opponents succeed in making that connection. The media for creating public imaginings varies by time and place. During the July Monarchy, the new technology of lithography made caricatures a particularly powerful communicator for a Parisian public. Television and radio are the favored media in the United States today. But then, as now, to galvanize public passions, a political message must relate a moral tale that is rooted in intimate relations and, ultimately, focused on specific individuals. An imagined protagonist might be collective: the corrupted "bourgeoisie" beside the brave and virtuous workers, for example, or, for some Americans today, the morally self-indulgent "generation of the sixties" juxtaposed against their morally responsible elders. But for a political struggle to incite public emotion, it has to personalize connections between the intimate sphere and politics through images of particular individuals, whether they be Queen Victoria, Louis-Philippe, or Bill and Hillary Clinton. To acknowledge this phenomenon complicates historical investigations of political struggles. Representations of major public figures are neither singular nor static. They have a history shaped by events, the representational strategies of opponents, and the presence of many publics, each with different social, hence moral, points of view. Moreover, given the importance of gender to the moral codes regulating intimate relations, images of public figures must be read with that dimension in mind to understand their political charge. The historiographical point of the endeavor recommended here is not to return to a conventional history of great men and women but rather to explain why stories about them had such a powerful effect on their own times and continue to fascinate our own. 46

Jo Burr Margadant is an associate professor of history at Santa Clara University, specializing in modern France. Her first book, Madame le Professeur: Women Educators in the Third Republic (1990), won four national prizes, the David Pinkney Prize, the 1991 Best Book in French History from the French Historical Studies Association (co-recipient), the 1991 Best Book Award from the Berkshire Conference on Women's History (co-recipient), and the 1991 Best Book Award from the History of Education Society. Though still focused on biography, her current research has turned from republican to monarchical France and from women's history to issues related to gender. Several recent articles, including the one presented here, ask what royal identities, constructed for and by key members of French royal families under the Bourbon Restoration (1814–1830) and during the July Monarchy (1830–1848) reveal about the political cultures that produced them. She intends to write a monograph that explores such issues through biographical essays on several members of the royal family during Louis-Philippe's reign, essays that also align her investigation and the narration of her findings with recent scholarly reflections on the genre of biography itself. Margadant's interest in new approaches to biography inspired her forthcoming edited volume, The New Biography: Performing Femininity in Nineteenth-Century France (2000). She will assume the duties of co-editor for French Historical Studies next summer.

Notes

A fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies and the generosity of Santa Clara University made the research for this article possible. John Merriman, Peter McPhee, Timothy Tackett, André Burguière, Sarah Hanley, Mary Louise Roberts, Catherine Kudlick, Karen Offen, Jonathan Beecher, and Keith Baker made especially helpful suggestions for improving the article at various points in its development, but I also profited from comments by graduate students and other colleagues at various conferences and colloquiums where I presented earlier versions of this work: Conference in Honor of Professor Eugen Weber, Clark Library, University of California, Los Angeles, April 20, 1996; the Tenth George Rudé Seminar (1996), Melbourne, Australia; Research Colloquium, History Department, Santa Clara University (1997); Guest Lecture, History Department of the University of California, Irvine (1998); and Stanford University's French Culture Workshop (1999). Several anonymous readers for the AHR encouraged me to place this analysis in a comparative perspective; without Michael Grossberg's patient prodding, though, I might not have seen how to incorporate such comments into my own vision for this work. As always, Ted Margadant has served, with his customary generosity, as my most important sounding board and supportive reader.
    The Photographic Service of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France kindly provided all illustrations that did not appear in Le charivari and La caricature and two illustrations from those publications. I am particularly grateful to Santa Clara University for a grant to defray the cost of copyright fees.
¹ Of the large literature on this subject, the works most important in shaping my own reflections on France are Lynn Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution (Berkeley, Calif., 1992); Sarah Maza, Private Lives and Public Affairs: The Causes Célèbres of Prerevolutionary France (Berkeley, 1993), esp. 167–211; Lynn Hunt, "Pornography and the French Revolution," in Hunt, ed., The Invention of Pornography: Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity, 1500–1800 (New York, 1993), 301–40; Sarah Maza, "The Diamond Necklace Affair Revisited (1785–1786): The Case of the Missing Queen," and Lynn Hunt, "The Many Bodies of Marie Antoinette: Political Pornography and the Problem of the Feminine in the French Revolution," in Eroticism and the Body Politic, Hunt, ed. (Baltimore, Md., 1991), 63–89, 108–30; Jacques Revel, "Marie-Antoinette in Her Fictions: The Staging of Hatred," in Fictions of the French Revolution, Bernadette Fort, ed. (Evanston, Ill., 1991); and Joan B. Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca, N.Y., 1988). On the British monarchy, see especially Margaret Homans, Royal Representations: Queen Victoria and British Culture, 1837–1876 (Chicago, 1998); Richard Williams, The Contentious Crown: Public Discussion of the British Monarchy in the Reign of Queen Victoria (Aldershot, 1997), esp. 197–265; Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven, Conn., 1992), 195–282; Thomas Laqueur, "The Queen Caroline Affair: Politics as Art in the Reign of George IV," Journal of Modern History 54 (September 1982): 417–66; Dror Wahrman, "'Middle-Class' Domesticity Goes Public: Gender, Class and Politics from Queen Caroline to Queen Victoria," Journal of British Studies 32 (1993): 308–39; and Rachel Weil, "Sometimes a Scepter Is Only a Scepter: Pornography and Politics in Restoration England," in Hunt, Eroticism and the Body Politic, 63–89.
² The theoretical literature distinguishing public and private spheres is voluminous. For a succinct summary of the varied theoretical approaches to these terms, see Jeff Weintraub, "The Theory and Politics of the Public/Private Distinction," Public and Private in Thought and Practice: Perspectives on a Grand Dichotomy, Weintraub and Krishan Kumar, eds. (Chicago, 1997), 1–42. The key theoretical work remains Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, Thomas Burger, trans. (Cambridge, Mass., 1989). Feminist scholarship has been particularly interested in how public and private spheres connect in theory and practice. See, for example, Joan B. Landes, ed., Feminism, the Public and the Private (New York, 1998); Linda K. Kerber, "Separate Spheres, Female Worlds, Woman's Place: The Rhetoric of Women's History," Journal of American History 75 (June 1988): 9–39; Leonore Davidoff, "Regarding Some 'Old Husbands' Tales': Public and Private in Feminist History," in Davidoff, Worlds Between: Historical Perspectives on Gender and Class (Oxford, 1995), 227–76; Dena Goodman, The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment (Ithaca, N.Y., 1994), 90–135, 233–80; Carole Pateman, "Feminist Critiques of the Public/Private Dichotomy," in Public and Private in Social Life, S. I. Benn and G. F. Gaus, eds. (London, 1983), 281–306; and especially the seminal article by Joan Wallach Scott, "Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis," AHR 91 (December 1986), rpt. in Gender and the Politics of History (New York, 1988), 28–52. For their relevance to the issues raised by this analysis, see especially Maza, Private Lives and Public Affairs, 1–17; Dena Goodman, "Public Sphere and Private Life: Toward a Synthesis of Current Historiographical Approaches to the Old Regime," History and Theory 31, no. 1 (1992): 1–20; and Roger Chartier, The Cultural Origins of the French Revolution, Lydia G. Cochrane, trans. (Durham, N.C., 1991), 111–35, 169–98.
³ Clarence E. Walker, "Denial Is Not a River in Egypt: Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson," in History, Memory, and Civic Culture, Peter Onuf and Jan Lewis, eds. (Charlottesville, Va., forthcoming).
⁴ Anna Clark, The Struggle for the Breeches: Gender and the Making of the British Working Class (Berkeley, Calif., 1995), esp. 233–47.
⁵ For the symbolic politics of the regime, see Michael Marrinan, Painting Politics for Louis-Philippe: Art and Ideology in Orléanist France, 1830–1848 (New Haven, Conn., 1988); Marrinan, "Historical Vision and the Writing of History at Louis-Philippe's Versailles," in The Popularization of Images: Visual Culture under the July Monarchy, Petra ten-Doesschate Chu and Gabriel P. Weisberg, eds. (Princeton, N.J., 1994), 113–43; Thomas W. Gaehtgens, "Le Musée historique de Versailles," and Hélène Himelfarb, "Versailles, fonctions et légendes," in Les lieux de mémoire, vol. 2, La nation, Pierre Nora, ed. (Paris, 1984), 143–68, 235–92. For the significance of the political ideas of François Guizot and other doctrinaires who defended the July Monarchy, see Pierre Rosanvallon, Le moment Guizot (Paris, 1985).
⁶ David H. Pinkney, Decisive Years in France, 1840–1847 (Princeton, N.J., 1986).
⁷ Pierre Rosanvallon, La monarchie impossible: Les chartes de 1814 et de 1830 (Paris, 1994), 149–81.
⁸ Rosanvallon, Le moment Guizot, 320–21.
⁹ Gordon Wright, France in Modern Times, 4th edn. (New York, 1981), 127–28.
¹⁰ Charles Ledré, La presse à l'assaut de la monarchie 1815–1848 (Paris, 1960); James Bash Cuno, "Charles Philipon and La Maison Aubert: The Business, Politics, and Public of Caricature in Paris, 1820–1840" (PhD dissertation, Harvard University, 1985); Elise K. Kenney and John M. Merriman, The Pear: French Graphic Arts in the Golden Age of Caricature (South Hadley, Mass., 1991); Sandy Petrey, "Pears in History," Representations 48 (Summer 1991): 52–80. For satirical images generally during the July Monarchy, see Chu and Weisberg, Popularization of Images; and Robert Justin Goldstein, Censorship of Political Caricature in Nineteenth-Century France (Kent, Ohio, 1989), 119–68. For a general study of political caricatures in nineteenth-century France, see Judith Wechsler, A Human Comedy: Physiognomy and Caricature in 19th Century Paris (London, 1982).
¹¹ Sarah Hanley, "The Monarchic State in Early Modern France: Marital Regime Government and Male Right," in Politics, Ideology and the Law in Early Modern Europe: Essays in Honor of J. H. M. Salmon, Adrianna E. Bakos, ed. (Rochester, N.Y., 1994), 107–26; and Hanley, "Social Sites of Political Practice in France: Lawsuits, Civil Rights, and the Separation of Powers in Domestic and State Government, 1500–1800," AHR 102 (February 1997): 27–52; Hunt, Family Romance of the French Revolution, 1–16.
¹² Robert A. Nye, Masculinity and Male Codes of Honor in Modern France (New York, 1993); William M. Reddy, The Invisible Code: Honor and Sentiment in Postrevolutionary France, 1814–1848 (Berkeley, Calif., 1997).
¹³ For descriptions of most of the illustrations examined for this study, see the catalogues for three collections of prints in the Salle des Estampes of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (hereafter, BNF): Collection de Vinck, Inventaire analytique, vol. 5, La révolution de 1830 et la Monarchie de Juillet, and vol. 6, La révolution de 1848 et la deuxième république (Paris, 1955); Georges Duplessis, Catalogue de la collection des portraits français et étrangers, vol. 6, Lafayette—Louis-Philippe (Paris, 1907); Michel Hennin and Georges Duplessis, Inventaire de la collection d'estampes relatives à l'histoire de France, léguée en 1863 à la Bibliothèque Nationale (Paris, 1882). I also consulted directly all the satirical periodicals with caricatures published during the July Monarchy: La caricature (1830–1835) (republican); Le charivari (1830–1837) (republican); Mayeux and Le véritable Mayeux (1831–1832) (republican); La charge ou les folies contemporaines (1832–1834) (favorable to the regime). Other opposition journals consulted: Cancans (Legitimist), La mode (Legitimist), Le national (republican), and La réforme (republican and socialist).
¹⁴ This aspect of the analysis advances into the nineteenth century important questions already raised by several historians of the Old Regime and French Revolution about the relationship between the state, women, and the family. In addition to works cited by Sarah Hanley and Lynn Hunt, see Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution; Sylvana Tomaselli, "The Enlightenment Debate on Women," History Workshop, no. 20 (1985): 101–24; Jean H. Bloch, "Women and the Reform of the Nation," in Women and Society in Eighteenth-Century France: Essays in Honour of John Stephenson Spink, Eva Jacobs, et al., eds. (London, 1979), 3–18. For the period after 1800, see Geneviève Fraisse, Muse de la raison: La démocratie exclusive et la différence des sexes (Aix-en-Provence, 1995); Michèle Riot-Sarcey, La démocratie à l'épreuve des femmes: Trois figures critiques du pouvoir 1830–1848 (Paris, 1994); Joan Wallach Scott, Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man (Cambridge, Mass., 1996).
¹⁵ The private archives of the royal family relevant to this study are held in the Archives Nationales under the Archives de France, 300 AP I, III–IV (hereafter, AF, AN). I wish to thank the comte de Paris for permission to consult these archives. See also Anne Martin-Fugier, La vie quotidienne de Louis-Philippe et de sa famille 1830–1848 (Paris, 1992).
¹⁶ I will be using the terms "bourgeois" and "elite" interchangeably in this article, although I have taken seriously William Reddy's admonition regarding the imprecision of "bourgeois" and never use the term with a transitive verb. See William M. Reddy, "The Concept of Class," in Social Orders and Social Classes in Europe since 1500: Studies in Social Stratification, M. L. Bush, ed. (London, 1992), 13–25. In The Invisible Code, Reddy uses "elite" for the culture he is describing; Nye uses bourgeois.
¹⁷ Nye maintains that this meritocratic honor code originated in bourgeois families in the Old Regime. For a different interpretation, see Jonathan Dewald, Aristocratic Experience and the Origins of Modern Culture: France, 1570–1715 (Berkeley, Calif., 1993).
¹⁸ Nye traces the origin of this polarity to the influence on bourgeois families in need of healthy sons of a biological science that imagined fathers to be the sole progenitors of their offspring and virility dependent on certain visible traits of the male body.
¹⁹ Reddy, Invisible Code, 114–227. Reddy explains the persistence of this system of patronage as the consequence of the continued importance of family property.
²⁰ François Furet, Revolutionary France, 1770–1880, Antonia Nevill, trans. (Oxford, 1992), 327.
²¹ Rosanvallon, La monarchie impossible, 105–35.
²² Archives parlementaires de 1787 à 1860: Recueil complet des débats législatifs et politiques des chambres françaises, M. J. Mavidal and M. E. Laurent, eds., 70, series 2 (1800–1860) (Paris). Session September 10, 1831, 321–29, and Session October 5, 1831, 370–76.
²³ Hanley, "Monarchic State in Early Modern France"; and Hunt, Family Romance of the French Revolution, 17–88.
²⁴ Hanley, "Monarchic State in Early Modern France." See also Jo Burr Margadant, "The Duchesse de Berry and Royalist Political Culture in Postrevolutionary France," History Workshop, no. 43 (Spring 1997): 23–52.
²⁵ For a similar argument based on a comparison of the maternal roles of the duchesse de Berry under the Restoration Monarchy and Hélène de Mecklenburg under the July Monarchy, see Jo Burr Margadant, "'La Monarchie impossible' revisitée: Les mères royales et l'imaginaire politique dans la Restauration et la Monarchie de Juillet," in Pour la Révolution française, Festschrift for Claude Mazauric, Christine Le Bozec and Eric Wauters, eds. (Rouen, 1998), 411–20.
²⁶ Lithograph by Lemonier, "Le Roi Citoyen et sa famille," Collection Portraits, Louis-Philippe, 80C 101283, Estampes, BNF. For an informal, anonymous popular print of the family in the garden of their chateau at Neuilly entitled "Roi Citoyen avec toute sa famille," see Collection Portraits, Louis-Philippe, 70C 41669, Estampes, BNF.
²⁷ Martin-Fugier, La vie quotidienne de Louis-Philippe et de sa famille, 25–42, 137–72, 201–26.
²⁸ Mathilde Larrère, "Ainsi paradait le roi des barricades: Les grandes revues royales de la garde nationale de Paris et de banlieue 1830–1840" (Mémoire de maîtrise, directed by Alain Corbin, University of Paris I, 1993). For a summary of the argument of the thesis, see Larrère, "Ainsi paradait le roi des barricades: Les grandes revues royales de la garde nationale, à Paris, sous la Monarchie de Juillet," Mouvement social 179 (1997): 9–31. For a visual image, see the painting by Joseph-Désiré Court, "Le roi donne les drapeaux à la Garde Nationale de Paris et de la banlieue, 29 août 1830" (The King Distributing Battalion Standards to the National Guard, August 29, 1830), which appeared in the Salon of 1836, ironically the same year this street ceremony would end for fear of assassination.
²⁹ In the days immediately following the revolution, Marie-Amélie and the royal princesses made several well-publicized hospital visits to men wounded in the fighting. Le moniteur universel reported regularly on the queen's charitable outings in this period. Printmakers reproduced such bedside scenes in several lithographs and engravings sold in Paris. At the Salon of 1833, Nicolas Gosse exhibited a major painting of one such visit. "S. M. la Reine des Français visitant les blessés de Juillet à la Ambulance de la Bourse (25 août 1830)." An engraving of this painting was made by Nargeot. Collection de Vinck, A 135556, Estampes, BNF.
³⁰ Janis Bergman-Carton also noted the presence of women in early images of the regime and their later disappearance, The Woman of Ideas in French Art, 1830–1848 (New Haven, Conn., 1995).
³¹ See, for example, the lithograph by Lemercier, "Souvenirs patriotiques" (Patriotic Memories), Collection Histoire de France, Qb1 M 111106, Estampes, BNF.
³² Bergman-Carton, Woman of Ideas in French Art, 21. The incident was reported in Le national on August 2, 1830, as follows: "In the street St. Honoré on the 27th, a woman between thirty and thirty-five years of age was shot dead by a bullet through her forehead. A baker's assistant . . . of colossal size and Herculean strength, immediately seized the corpse and holding it over his head, took it to the Place des Victoires, crying: 'Vengeance!' . . . Then, picking up the corpse again, he carried it towards the military guard [garde de corps] for the Banque . . . He threw the bloody corpse at them crying: 'Look, that's how your comrades treat our women! . . . Would you do the same?'" This text was reprinted in a widely distributed account of the revolution, Une semaine de l'histoire de Paris. See the lithograph by Michel Delaporte, "Scène du 27 juillet—première victime, 1830" (First Victim, Scene from the 27th of July, 1830), Collection de Vinck, A 12981, and the anonymous lithograph that appeared as the first of twelve plates commemorating the July Revolution in the Album national (August–September 1830), for which the caption reads: "It's a woman! all right then! let's carry this bleeding corpse as a sign for the eyes of all Paris to see." Collection de Vinck, Qb1 A 12980, Estampes, BNF.
³³ Ferdinand-Philippe-D'Orléans, Duc d'Orléans, Souvenirs 1820–1830 (Geneva, 1993), figure 8.
³⁴ Catherine Duprat, "Des femmes sur les barricades de juillet 1830: Histoire d'un imaginaire social," La barricade, Colloquium, University of Paris, 1995 (Paris, 1997). I wish to thank Professor Duprat for allowing me to see this article before its publication. See also Marica Pointon, "Liberty on the Barricades: Women, Politics and Sexuality in Delacroix," in Siân Reynolds, ed., Women, State and Revolution: Essays on Power and Gender in Europe since 1789 (Sussex, 1986), 25–43. For other important work on women in revolutions in France from 1789 to 1848, see Dorinda Outram, The Body and the French Revolution: Sex, Class and Political Culture (New Haven, Conn., 1989); Darline Gay Levy, Harriet Branson Applewhite, and Mary Durham Johnson, eds., Women in Revolutionary Paris, 1780–1795: Selected Documents (Urbana, Ill., 1979); Madelyn Gutwirth, The Twilight of the Goddesses: Women and Representation in the French Revolutionary Era (New Brunswick, N.J., 1992), 115–16; Dominique Godineau, The Women of Paris and Their French Revolution, Katherine Streip, trans. (Berkeley, Calif., 1998); David Barry, Women and Political Insurgency: France in the Mid-Nineteenth Century (New York, 1996); Laura Struminger, "Les Vésuviennes: Images of Women Warriors in 1848 and Their Significance for French History," Journal of the History of European Ideas 8 (1987): 451–88; Jann Matlock, Scenes of Seduction: Prostitution, Hysteria, and Reading Difference in Nineteenth-Century France (New York, 1994).
³⁵ See, for example, the lithograph by Charles-Joseph Traviès, "Tout avouer que le gouvernement a une bien drôle de tête" (Everybody Agrees the Government Has a Funny Head), La caricature, no. 60 (December 22, 1831), which includes two prominent bonnets amidst the crowd of men who have gathered to examine political caricatures hanging in the window of Aubert's printing house.
³⁶ Political artists dispensed almost entirely with an earlier practice, used massively against the Bourbons in 1830, of drawing political enemies as animals whose characters they supposedly resembled. Far more frequently after 1830, a man's relationship to women became a shorthand expression of his character and authority. Some of the interpretations of specific caricatures that I offer below repeat observations already made by Cuno, "Charles Philipon and La Maison Aubert"; Kenney and Merriman, The Pear; and Petrey, "Pears in History."
³⁷ Amy Wiese Forbes argues that Charles Philipon and his team of caricaturists for Le charivari and La caricature moved only gradually from a critique of the regime to fully republican convictions in the early 1830s. "The Satiric Decade: Satire and the Development of Republicanism in France, 1830–1840" (PhD dissertation, Rutgers University, 1999), chap. 1.
³⁸ Design by Grandville (J.-I.-I. Gérard) and Bernard-Romain Julien, lithograph by Becquet, "Barbe bleue, blanche et rouge" (Blue, White and Red Beard), La caricature, no. 127, plate 263 (April 11, 1833). The commentary explained: "'It's Louis-Philippe about to slaughter Constitution . . .' The Press leans out of her tower holding two republican papers, La tribune and Le national. Constitution calls to her: 'Press, my sister, don't you see anyone coming?'—'I see two knights riding at a gallop carrying a banner; it's the banner of the Republic.'"
³⁹ Artist unknown, lithograph by Becquet, "Le nouveau Josué" (The New Joshua), Le charivari, no. 323 (October 20, 1833). Note that the miniaturized king atop the Tuileries Palace stands poised on tiptoe like a child. The commentary reads: "le Système [code for Louis-Philippe], his lance raised, has pulled himself up to the roof of the Tuileries, where, on the tips of his toes, he is trying to pierce the sun [the Republic] as it passes. He won't be successful because the 'sun' will overwhelm him and the monarchs of the Holy Alliance [Russia, Austria, Prussia]."
⁴⁰ The interpretation presented here for the softened umbrella does not exclude other meanings for an object whose polysemic possibilities made it a favorite icon for caricaturists and equal to the pear as an evocation of Louis-Philippe.
⁴¹ According to J. B. Cuno, the pear as a sign carried several possible interpretations. A pear-shaped head on the king portrayed him as a "fat-head"; depicted with a pear-shaped body, the king became a "fat-ass." When a pear replaced the king entirely, it carried sexual connotations in the same way that an apple might imply the sexuality of a woman. Thus a pear, drawn with the softened outline of an over-ripe fruit, ridiculed the potency of Louis-Philippe on several levels. Cuno, "Charles Philipon and La Maison Aubert," 193–258.
⁴² Design by Grandville and Eugène Forest, lithograph by Becquet, "Les faux dieux de l'Olympe" (The False Gods of Olympus), La caricature, no. 98, plates 200–01 (September 20, 1832). A long commentary for this illustration mocks all the members of the government, its repression of the opposition, and its weak foreign policy. Louis-Philippe believed that the survival of a constitutional monarchy in France as well as its prosperity required a peaceful foreign policy in Europe, a view his critics readily interpreted as a failure of character or worse.
⁴³ Artist unknown, lithograph by Becquet, "Un pauvre père de famille qui n'a que quelques millions de revenus" (A Poor Father of a Family Who Has an Income of Only a Few Millions), Le charivari, no. 344 (November 10, 1833), série politique 129. Although the commentary reports that the king's "family" are members of the government, readers would have understood that this image, in fact, referred to the king's own family.
⁴⁴ Design by Auguste Bouquet, lithograph by Becquet, "La poire et ses pépins" (The Pear and Its Seeds), La caricature, no. 139, plate 289 (July 4, 1833). The first caricature presenting Marie-Amélie, the king's sister Adélaïde, and the duc d'Orléans as pears appeared as a lithograph by Grandville and Forest, "La physiologie de la poire" (The Physiology of the Pear), in La caricature, no. 106 (November 15, 1832), plate 219. Shortly thereafter, the same caricature was reproduced as the cover piece for a satirical essay by Louis Benoît (pseudonym, Peytel) under the same title (Paris, 1832). The subject of the caricature was a mock court reception.
⁴⁵ Alfred Colling, Louis-Philippe, homme d'argent (Paris, 1977).
⁴⁶ For the final unsuccessful effort to get a dotation for the duc de Nemours in 1844, see the dossier "Projet de Rapport au Roi sur le Projet de Loi de Dotation" in 300 AP III 34, AF, AN.
⁴⁷ Louis de Cormenin, a republican deputy in the Chamber of Deputies, published several pamphlets in the form of letters between 1831 and 1844 attacking the king and his family's purported avarice. Four of these letters concerned the civil list. Two pamphlets attacking the dotation of the duc de Nemours went to eighteen editions in 1844.
⁴⁸ See the lithograph by Honoré Daumier, "Petits . . . venez donc dindons!" La caricature, no. 212 (November 27, 1834). Louis-Henry Lecomte, Frédérick-Lemaître: Etude biographique (Paris, 1865), 37–43; Frédérick Lemaître, Souvenirs publiés par son fils (Paris, 1880), 145–98; Robert Baldick, The Life and Times of Frédérick Lemaître (Fair Lawn, N.J., 1959), 129–44; Marvin Carlson, "Minor Theatres and the End of Romanticism," in Carlson, The French Stage in the Nineteenth Century (Metuchen, N.J., 1972), 103–17. For a particularly rich and insightful discussion of this form of satire in Parisian popular and boulevard theaters, see Forbes, "Satiric Decade," chap. 2.
⁴⁹ Ledré, La presse à l'assaut de la monarchie.
⁵⁰ Ledré, La presse à l'assaut de la monarchie, 128–29.
⁵¹ Reddy, Invisible Code, 194–95.
⁵² Design by C. J. Traviès, lithograph by Junca (Passage Saulnier, no. 6), "Personnification du Système le plus doux et le plus humain" (Personification of the Gentlest and Most Humane System [a code word in the paper's political lexicon for Louis-Philippe]), Le charivari, no. 198 (July 27, 1835). The subtitle reads: "Monarchical catacombs. A little record of the subjects of H.M. who have perished through the mistakes / of Public Security / drawn up from daily records, on the occasion of today's funeral anniversary of July 27." The annual celebration of the anniversary of the revolution of 1830 always began on July 27 with a day of commemoration for the men who died during the three-day revolution and whose remains were placed in 1840 under a commemorative column on the Place de la Bastille. The title of the caricature refers to a remark by the minister Adolphe Thiers: "Qu'on me cite un pouvoir plus doux et plus humaine."
⁵³ See the lawyer's brief for the de Rohan family over this disputed fortune. Plaidoyer de M. Hennequin, avocat pour MM les princes de Rohan contre S. A. R. Mgr le duc d'Aumale et contre madame la Baronne de Feuchères (Paris, 1832). A lithograph dating from 1832, "Le fossoyeur" (The Gravedigger), and inspired by this tale of family murders, depicts Louis-Philippe digging up the skulls of the three Bourbons, each clearly recognizable. The subtitle reads: "While digging the grave of his niece, he disturbs with indifference the bones of his family." Collection Histoire de France, 1832, Qb1 M 112123, Estampes, BNF. For a summary of these fantastic imaginings by a Legitimist polemicist after 1848, see La vérité sur Louis-Philippe, ses crimes, ses trahisons, ses bassesses, depuis sa naissance jusqu'à sa fuite; Détails secrets, recueillis [sic] sur les pièces et manuscrits authentiques par un ancien ministre (Paris, 1848).
⁵⁴ Honoré Daumier, Collection Histoire de France, July 1834, Qb1 M 112444, Estampes, BNF.
⁵⁵ Anonymous print, Collection Histoire de France, 1834, Qb1 M 112445, Estampes, BNF.
⁵⁶ Anne Martin-Fugier, La vie élégante ou la formation du Tout-Paris 1815–1848 (Paris, 1990), 215–74.
⁵⁷ This point is obvious from the great many popular prints as well as all official paintings of official occasions and celebrations that comprise the print collection of the Salle des Estampes.
⁵⁸ For the history of these annual military parades, see Larrère, "Ainsi paradait le roi des barricades."
⁵⁹ Alain Corbin, "L'impossible présence du roi: Fêtes politiques et mises en scène du pouvoir sous la Monarchie de Juillet," in Les usages politiques des fêtes aux XIX^e–XX^e siècles, Corbin, et al., eds. (Paris, 1994), 77–116; and Isabelle Franceschetti, "Le sang royal: Les tentatives de régicide contre Louis-Philippe, 1832–1846" (Mémoire de maîtrise, directed by Alain Corbin, University de Paris I, 1990).
⁶⁰ For laudatory descriptions of the duc d'Orléans after his death, see Jules Janin, Le prince royal (Paris, 1842); J. Arago and E. Gouin, Histoire du prince royal: Détails inédits sur sa vie et sur sa mort, puisés à des sources authentiques (Paris, 1842); V. Chatelain, Réflexions sur la mort de S. A. R. Mgr le duc d'Orléans; Eugène Briffaut, Portrait de S. A. R. Mgr le duc d'Orléans (Geneva, 1842); Montémont, Notice nécrologique sur S. A. R. Mgr le duc d'Orléans prince royal . . . (Paris, 1843); Germain Sarrut and Saint-Edmé, Biographie du Prince Royal Ferdinand-Philippe-Louis-Charles-Henri-Joseph de Bourbon, duc de Chartres et d'Orléans (Extrait de la Biographie des hommes du jour, Tome VI, 2^e Partie), 2d edn. (Paris, 1843). For a recent biography, see Joëlle Hureau, L'espoir brisé: Le duc d'Orléans 1810–1842 (Paris, 1995).
⁶¹ Jules Janin, Fontainebleau, Versailles, Paris (juin 1837) (Paris, 1837). Janin gives a vivid description of the successful ceremonies surrounding the marriage. For a reprint of an account in La presse of Hélène's warm reception in Paris, see Delphine Gay Girardin, Vicomte de Launay: Lettres parisiennes, vol. 1 (Paris, 1857), 141–45.
⁶² Emphasis added. The full statement went as follows: "Puisque les femmes ne sont pas admises à exercer . . . le pouvoir royal, elles ne doivent pas être appelées à l'exercer par délégation. La variété des exemples de notre histoire ne saurait prévaloir sur les principes constitutifs de la monarchie et les plus graves intérêts du pays. La sûreté de l'Etat, la nature de nos institutions, l'énergique dévélopement des libertés publiques, veulent que le pouvoir royal soit dans des mains viriles." Le moniteur universel, no. 22 (August 10, 1842): 1768.
⁶³ "Je reconnais . . . quelque chose de contradictoire avec la présence d'une femme au pouvoir . . . [et] cette pernicieuse malignité de la press." Le moniteur universel, no. 231 (August 19, 1842): 1810.
⁶⁴ "La dynastie si récente, que vous avez assise sur le cratère fermé de tant de révolutions, doit être . . . une dynastie à cheval . . . Il faut que . . . le passage d'un régime à l'autre se fasse sous une voûte de baïonnettes." Le moniteur universel, no. 231 (August 19, 1842): 1809.
⁶⁵ For a description of the difficulty of obtaining promotions for officers before 1848, see William Serman, Les origines des officiers français 1848–1870 (Paris, 1979), 18–20. Letters from the duc d'Orléans and duc d'Aumale to their father while in Algeria suggest the difficulties that their commanding officers had in relation to the princes.
⁶⁶ An attempted assassination in 1840 of the duc d'Aumale as he entered Paris at the head of a division of the Algerian army suggests the power of such claims.
⁶⁷ The family's private letters repeatedly refer to this precaution over the course of the reign.
⁶⁸ Anonymous lithograph of Horace Vernet's painting "Louis-Philippe and His Sons Riding Out from the Château of Versailles," Collection Histoire de France, C 23433, Estampes, BNF. The painting appeared at the Salon of 1847 and was purchased by Louis-Philippe for the national museum at Versailles. It included the popular first son of the king, the duc d'Orléans, who had died five years earlier.
⁶⁹ This was a possibility intimated, intentionally or not, in a lithograph from shortly before the revolution, depicting the young comte de Paris, the eldest son of the defunct duc d'Orléans, still in skirts, surrounded by his uniformed uncles carrying swords. The print is signed Collette and Sanson after Lalisse, lithographer F. Dupont. Collection de Vinck, A 14822, Estampes, BNF.
⁷⁰ Procès de M. Cabet contre "Le national" au sujet des bastilles, et duel proposé (Paris, 1841). Patricia O'Brien, "L'Embastillement de Paris: The Fortification of Paris during the July Monarchy," French Historical Studies 9 (1975): 63–82.
⁷¹ Procès des lettres attribuées par le journal "La France" au roi Louis-Philippe: Cour d'assise de la Seine du 24 avril (Paris, 1841).
⁷² The play was subsequently banned. Lemaître claimed in the memoirs published by his son that he had not intended to mock the king. Lemaître, Souvenirs publiés par son fils, 235–71. See also Baldick, Life and Times of Frédérick Lemaître, 174–83. For background on Vidocq, who served briefly as chief of security for Paris under the Restoration Monarchy after several years in prison, see Eric Perrin, Vidocq (Paris, 1995), 206–08; and the recent reedition of his writings, Eugène-François Vidocq, Mémoires: Les voleurs (Paris, 1998).
⁷³ For an interesting variation on this theme, see Albert Boime, "Going to Extremes over the Construction of the Juste Milieu," in Chu and Weisberg, Popularization of Images, 213–36.
⁷⁴ Physiologie du parapluie par deux cochers de fiacre (Paris, 1841); Physiologie du blagueur, par une société en commandite (Paris, 1841); James Rousseau, Physiologie du Robert-Macaire, illustrations by H. Daumier (Paris, 1842).
⁷⁵ I base this observation on the kinds of crimes regularly reported in the republican and socialist paper La réforme for the year 1847. These reports offer a fascinating contrast with what was normally reported in the official paper Le moniteur universel by way of incidental crimes, almost all of which were committed by members of the lower classes.
⁷⁶ Victor Hugo, Choses vues, 1830–1848 (Paris, 1998), 162–66, 185, 224–35.
⁷⁷ In fact, the king left France with hardly any money on his person, and the family had considerable difficulty preserving their private property from confiscation by the French government. The king and queen resided at the estate of Twickenham in England as guests of the British royal family until their deaths.
⁷⁸ Artist unknown, Imprimerie Lemercier, Paris. The caption under the drumming figure on the left, which represents François Guizot, reads: "Parade par le fameux Guizotin" (Parade by the Famous Clown Guizot). The publicity panel behind the pyramid of princes reads: "Extraordinary show for the benefit of the French people. Grand and last pyramid of the disloyal family, the First Mountebanks [Saltimbanques] of Europe." The caption on the lower right beneath two children of the people, one of whom is thumbing his nose at the Orléans clowns, reads: "The public exhibits its great satisfaction." Collection de Vinck, 1848, P 31641, Estampes, BNF. It may be that the reference for this caricature was "Les Saltimbanques," a satirical play by Charles Odry that figured in the repertoire of the popular theater Variétés in the late 1840s. One journalist described the leading character, Bilboquet, as a smaller Robert Macaire. Quoted by Lecomte, Frédérick-Lemaître, 66.
⁷⁹ See, for example, H. A. C. Collingham, The July Monarchy: A Political History of France 1830–1848 (London, 1988), 103.
⁸⁰ For a description of her reception of the duc de Joinville at Les Invalides, see Hugo, Choses vues, 31.
⁸¹ The society column that Delphine de Girardin wrote for her husband's paper La presse under her alias, le vicomte de Launay, rarely included any social occasion at the Tuileries Palace in the 1840s, even though Emile de Girardin was sympathetic to the monarchy.
⁸² Marie-Amélie avoided political judgments in her correspondence, but she stayed up every night with her husband until he finished signing official documents. The extremely close relationship between husband and wife and occasional references to political matters in his correspondence with her makes clear he talked to her about his concerns. The queen was also the confidante of her two most politicized children, the duc d'Orléans and her eldest daughter Louise, Queen of the Belgians, when they disagreed with their father's policies. See d'Orléans, Souvenirs 1820–1830; and Mia Kerchvoorde, Louise d'Orléans reine oubliée 1812–1850, Lucinne Plisnier and Flooris van Deyssel, trans. (Paris, 1991).
⁸³ No French king had ever made a diplomatic visit outside of France. Nothing in the private papers of the family explain why the queen stayed home, nor are there any regrets expressed about her having done so. It appears to have been taken for granted by both the king and queen that she would not go to England.
⁸⁴ The duc d'Orléans admitted to disagreements with his father as early as August 1830 when he wrote his memoirs in 1831. His strong views and emotional character also made differences with his father apparent to others, including members of the government, though he never openly rebelled. D'Orléans, Souvenirs, 389–91. The manuscript of these memoirs is located in 300 AP IV 159, AF, AN.
⁸⁵ This invisibility of the princesses did not apply to the provinces. The duc de Nemours and his wife Victoire made several ceremonial trips to provincial cities in the 1840s.
⁸⁶ To defend her husband's honor would be the guiding obsession of the queen throughout the reign and after the family's exile. She collected all the papers that now constitute the bulk of the Orléans papers in the Archives de France in an effort to prove Louis-Philippe's honorability. On the question of honor, the duc d'Orléans left a moving description of his own and his parents' state of mind in early August 1830 in his memoirs. Souvenirs, 386–87.
⁸⁷ For an unpublished description of this and other events of the revolution by the second son of Louis-Philippe, the duc de Chartres, see 300 APIV 172, AF, AN.
⁸⁸ Daniel Stern (pseudonym for Marie d'Agoult), Histoire de la révolution de 1848, vol. 1, 2d edn. (Paris, 1878), 142.
⁸⁹ Stern, Histoire de la révolution de 1848, 144.
⁹⁰ The full text in French reads: "La Promenade des cadavres aux flambeaux / Vengeance! . . . aux armes! . . . on assassine nos frères!" Anonymous engraving, Collection de Vinck, P 31378, Estampes, BNF.
⁹¹ The signature "à Paris 1848" also suggested that the artist was a foreign observer. The lithograph is titled "Scene near the National. Time—Night" and depicts the cart stopped in front of the offices of the republican paper Le national, where the paper's editor, Louis-Antoine Garnier-Pagès, addressed the crowd. There are five bodies represented, whereas Daniel Stern reported there were seven. The caption underneath reads: "The bodies of those who had just been destroyed before the Hôtel des Affaires Etrangères, arranged in a cart, accompanied with a dense mass of the populace bearing torches, who chant in a mournful voice 'Mourir pour la patrie,' stopping and pointing to the mangled remains of their comrades, terrifically shriek aloud for vengeance." Collection de Vinck, P 31381, Estampes, BNF. Roger Price included an unidentified print depicting the chariot of corpses as Daniel Stern described it in his first edition of 1848 in France (Ithaca, N.Y., 1975), 24. That print vanished from his recent revised edition, Documents on the French Revolution of 1848 (New York, 1996). I wish to thank Mark Traugott for bringing the first edition of Price's documentary collection to my attention.
⁹² Design and lithograph by A. Provost, "Journée du mercredi 23 février," the caption reads: "The dead, fallen in front of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, were placed in a cart and driven around under the light of torches." This print is the first plate in a series of twelve entitled "Paris en 1848," printed by Aubert. Provost was the lithographer for the first ten prints, all of which illustrate the embattled and masculinized world of politics constructed in the republican press. Collection de Vinck, P 31374, Estampes, BNF. For other illustrations of the cart of corpses, see Collection de Vinck, P 31368, P 31377, P 31379, P 31380, P 31383, and Collection Histoire de France Qb1 M 113441. Mark Traugott brought to my attention another print that is also devoid of women; see Louis-Antoine Garnier-Pagès, Histoire de la révolution, édition illustrée (Paris, n.d.), 148.
⁹³ Peter Sahlins, Forest Rites: The War of the Demoiselles in Nineteenth-Century France (Cambridge, Mass., 1994), 32. The politics of insurrection retained this feature of popular outrage, to judge from evidence on the outbreak of the Commune presented in Gay L. Gullickson, Unruly Women of Paris: Images of the Commune (Ithaca, N.Y., 1996), 18, 54, 60, 77, 124–25. As in 1848, this popular moral judgment would be overridden in 1871 in the account offered in the French press of the repression of the Communards by the army (directed by the government in Versailles).
⁹⁴ Williams, Contentious Crown, esp. 197–265; Homans, Royal Representations; Colley, Britons, 195–283; Laqueur, "Queen Caroline Affair"; Wahrman, "'Middle-Class' Domesticity Goes Public."
⁹⁵ For the theme of the corrupting influence of money in Honoré Balzac's novels, see Sharif Gemie, "Balzac and the Moral Crisis of the July Monarchy," European History Quarterly 19, no. 4 (1989): 469–94.

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